Movies

There's more to Angela Davis than her signature afro. A new documentary, Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners, explores the events that turned the philosophy professor into a political icon in the 1960s. Jada Pinkett Smith tells host Michel Martin why she became executive producer of the film.

Her scripts gave the sprawling Merchant-Ivory films substance. She won her first screenwriting Oscar for A Room With a View and her second for Howard's End. She won the Booker Prize in 1975 for her novel Heat and Dust. The cause of death was complications of a pulmonary condition. Jhabvala was 85.

Already the poster child for his country's so-called New Wave of filmmakers, the director takes another realistic dive into the post-Communist Eastern Bloc with Beyond the Hills. Though he hesitates to call it a straight metaphor, the symbolism of the film is uncanny.

Actor Saoirse Ronan could watch Amy Heckerling's teen comedy Clueless a million times. "There are so many great moments and I literally love every single moment from start to finish of that film," she says.

McAvoy plays a sketchy art auctioneer in Danny Boyle's new heist thriller, Trance. He almost didn't take the part because he didn't want to play the role of a victim. Then he took a closer look and found something that made him "hungry."

Host Scott Simon speaks with Ian Crouch, web producer for The New Yorker, about tropes in movie trailers throughout the years. Crouch's blog post, "Trailer Trash," was published Friday on The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog.

The slow, silky pace of Gilles Bourdos' biopic Renoir might burden a lesser subject. But the beauty of the cinematography suggests the aesthetic of the Impressionist master, lending the whole film a surreally beautiful air. (Recommended)

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